Kira looked at the door, which read AFA DEMOUX, and below it in thick block letters, IT. Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer: OPERATIONS, SALES, MARKETING. Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters, so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for. Invention . . . Testing. She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random looting—no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone from East Meadow? One of the Partials?

Who else was there?

CHAPTER THREE

“This hearing is now in session.”

Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been trashed in a Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had been closed a few months before, so why not? Of course, Marcus thought, the building is the least of the things that have changed since then. The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed, standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and Delarosa’s final sentence.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop laughing at me,” she growled.

“I wasn’t laughing out loud.”

“I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”

“Smell?”